I Am Going to Meet My Brother

Relsomore (“Rail-sea”). Vast spaces of poisoned land, covered with a network of steel rails and wooden sleepers. Tracks connecting times and countries run in all directions you look. They disappear into eternity. But from island to island, there are rumors that somewhere beyond the horizon there is an exit to a place with no rails—there, where Paradise lies, filled with wealth… And it is precisely Shémus ap Suurap, the doctor’s assistant on the mole-hunting train “Midas,” who finds the key to this mystery. But will he be able to reach the edge of Rail-sea before pirates and the rail fleet get to him?

Here, it’s good to gather stones smoothed by waves and to hunt for black, vicious crabs. The boys from the school settlement lying south of the Ratál spaceport, on their way home, always stop by the shore. Stuffing their pockets with finds whose value adults never—and still don’t—understand, they run up the high steps. They like the Old Staircase more than the escalator that runs among the rocks a hundred steps from here.

At that time, I’d just finished a report on the third expedition to the Amazon basin. Now I could spend an entire month reading ordinary books, the ones I’d been so hungry for during those days of intense work.

Taking a slim volume of poems or one of Randin’s novellas, I went up to the upper landing of the Old Staircase. The place was empty. Grass grew in the cracks of the stone slabs. Birds nested in the curls of heavy capitals.

At first, I was always alone on the landing. Then, after some time, a tall dark-skinned man in a gray jacket of an odd cut began to come there. In the first few days, we, as if by mutual agreement, didn’t pay attention to each other. But aside from us, almost no one came here, and as we kept running into each other, we eventually started greeting each other. Yet we never talked. I read a book, and the stranger seemed to be preoccupied with some thought—so busy that he didn’t want to join a conversation.

This man always came in the evening. The sun hung over the Northern Spit behind which the white buildings of Konstanta clustered. The sea was losing its blue, and the waves flashed like gray metal. In the east, reflecting the evening sun, the arches of an old overpass turned pink. It stood on the edge of the Ratál spaceport, like a monument to the times when planetary liners weren’t yet adapted for vertical takeoff.

When the stranger arrived at the landing, he would sit down on the base of a column and silently wait, propping his chin on his fist.Contents:

Wait for “Magellan”

Night road

The fourth sun